To take advantage of opportunities/solve problems, the need for a greater than local/cross-boundary approach can be seen. Regional cooperation is the nominal tool, yet the goal is to be greater; have greater capacity, resources, market,…. Greater is regional; working across boundaries achieves it. Cooperation is possible when people recognize such regional community. This is regional intelligence: Greater Communities solving problems, of which security is foremost; altogether “community motive.”

Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 4:58 PMTo: Sustainable CommunitiesSubject: Announcing the Second Webinar on the Capacity Building for Sustainable Communities Program

As announced earlier this month, HUD’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities and EPA’s Offices of Sustainable Communities, Water, and Brownfields and Land Revitalization have issued a joint Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for the Capacity Building for Sustainable Communities Program.

HUD and EPA will be hosting a second webcast to discuss this funding opportunity and answer questions related to the NOFA on Wednesday, June 29, at 4:30 pm Eastern Time.

In order to participate in the webinar on the Capacity-Building NOFA you will need both to call in by phone and to log in online. Instructions are as follows.

Telephone Access

In order to hear webinar audio, please call (800) 762-7308. There is no passcode—an operator will ask for your name and other optional information, and then connect you to the call.

We urge you to check beforehand to ensure that LiveMeeting works on your computer.

We look forward to your participation.

We will send out an email with the access information shortly.

Applications for the NOFA are due July 8, 2011. Nonprofit organizations, local or state public agencies, for-profit organizations, nationally recognized and accredited Universities or Colleges, or any combination of eligible entities as a Capacity Building Team are eligible to apply for funding. For more information on how to apply, including recently posted FAQs, please review the NOFA by clicking here.

For more information on this funding opportunity, please visit hud.gov/sustainability, or contact Rachel Kirby in HUD’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at rachel.t.kirby@hud.gov.

CNT provided the analysis for the new Transportation4America report, Aging in Place, Stuck Without Options, out today on the cities that have worst mobility options for seniors. Large cities with the poorest transit access for seniors included Atlanta, Riverside-San Bernardino (CA), Houston, Detroit, and Dallas-90% of seniors in Atlanta will lack transit access in 2015. Medium-sized cities (1million-3million) with the poorest transit access for seniors are Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth-Arlington, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. By 2015, 88% of seniors in Kansas City will have poor access to public transit.

CNT Research Director Peter Haas ... “As you see in the cities that top the worst mobility options for seniors, urban form is more spread out. Baby boomers by and large were raised in more dispersed communities where auto-dependency was the favored mode of transport. As the boomers age in these areas, they will be most affected by lack of public transportation.”...

The law is a manifestation of Nevada's mounting frustration with Tahoe development restrictions. Though critics say TRPA has rarely balked at any major development project at the lake, cumbersome regulations often produce years of delay and extra compliance costs.

"It's an issue about the pace of work that gets done," said Maureen McCarthy, executive director of the Tahoe Science Consortium. "Nevada's position is driven heavily by the economic climate. The state is broke, and by comparison to California, Nevada is really broke."

McCarthy's group helps government officials understand the science that affects Tahoe. She said TRPA has been invaluable in that regard because it welcomes that science and incorporates it into decisions.

... "We don't want to see the baby thrown out with the bath water, and the baby is science."...

California state Sen. Ted Gaines, R-Roseville, supports the new Nevada law. His district includes the California portion of Lake Tahoe, ...

The Seneca Nation of Indians wants to be a bigger player in economic development across Western New York and into Pennsylvania.

The nation hosted a meeting of economic development officials from both states Thursday in its Seneca Allegany Casino to learn what each other has to offer and how they can work together in the future.

“For the longest time, I’ve wanted to get all the IDAs and development agencies in this region together in one room to discover and discuss what we have in common,” said Robert Odawi Porter, the Seneca Nation president.

“Let’s see how we can all work together to foster and build economic development options to benefit all our people, whether they live within Seneca, New York or Pennsylvania boundaries,” Porter said. “Good business knows no boundaries.”

... meeting was one of the first times that economic development officials from the Seneca Nation and five New York and two Pennsylvania counties had gotten together to talk about economic development.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's major study of the greater Chicago area -- from southeast Wisconsin to Northwest Indiana -- is one more effort to chart a course for the area's future.

The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce is leading the Paris-based OEDC's tri-state study to analyze the region's economic impact. In the process, the chamber will gauge the area's economic competitiveness, attractiveness, sustainability and political climate compared to other major cities around the world.As a major study, the effort includes amassing an army of data. But it's also a call to arms for people and organizations to improve the situation here.

The Gary and Region Investment Project ...is a similar undertaking for Northwest Indiana....

"I think people are recognizing that we could be in trouble unless we take steps to act," Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce Foundation President .... "There's a recognition on a global scale that regional approaches ... make sense."...

We face massive challenges … and we are inspired.” This is the opening line of what until a few years ago would have been considered an improbable urban manifesto. Crafted in 2006 by the Social Silicon Valley collective, Towards City 2.0 is a compelling call to arms that was submitted to an international ideas competition launched by officials in Helsinki, Finland. Confronted with the need to address issues of rapid population growth and environmental change, 14 towns and municipalities in the Helsinki Metropolitan Region turned to the public, looking for solutions that would address their residential, land use and transportation needs of the future. In six incredibly insightful pages, City 2.0 details the collective’s vision for a city that doubles as an innovation hub. Here, hyperlocal ideas are connected to the larger city fabric through a “social innovation mayor,” a political figure responsible for driving long-term structural changes by unlocking the capacity of others to ...

.. Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Madison ... a small but sharp audience gathered to hear Tim Lomax of the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) debate Joe Cortwright of CEOs for Cities. Tim was there to defend TTI's influential Urban Mobility Report (UMR), an annual compendium of statistics that are widely used to define how US cities think about mobility problems and to benchmark these cities against each other. Joe was there to attack TTI's methodology as biased against compact, sustainable cities.

The technical core of the argument is simple. TTI's Travel Time Index, one of their more quoted products, is a ratio of peak congested travel times by car against uncongested travel times by car. In other words, travel times are said to be "worse" only if they get much longer in peak commute hours than they are midday.

This ratio inevitably gives "better" scores to cities where normal uncongested travel times are pretty long -- in other words, spread-out cities. ...

A new Ministerial Advisory Council is to be established to advise the Minister for Regional Australia on issues affecting country communities.

The Minister, Simon Crean said the new Council would give regional communities even stronger backing at the highest level of government.

Mr Crean said $4.3 billion was budgeted for key investments in regional communities including health and hospitals, skills, higher education and infrastructure.

He said the Government had strengthened the role of the nation’s 55 Regional Development Australia Committees and was driving a new place-based approach to help deliver local solutions to local issues.

“We are determined to make sure regional communities can meet the challenge of an economy in transition and reach their full potential,” Mr Crean said....

The Mayor of Clare launched the Clare County Development Plan 2011-2017 today describing it as a “window of opportunity for the County to foster innovation, creativity and new sustainable, inclusive development.”

Councillor Christy Curtin joined Council officials as well as Clare’s 31 other Elected Members at the official launch in Aras Contae an Chláir.

The Clare County Development Plan 2011-2017 sets out an overall strategy for the proper planning and sustainable development of the functional area of Clare County Council. The six-year blueprint replaces the existing County Development Plan 2005 and is the sixth such Plan since 1964.

... Mayor Curtin stated: “The primary goal of this Plan is to position County Clare as a driver for local and regional growth through harnessing the potential of its unique location, quality of life, natural resources and other competitive advantages. Ultimately, the Plan seeks to make County Clare a better place to live in, work and visit.”

Enhancing capabilities through regional collaboration. The tech community has provided the opportunity to enhance our communications and coordination.

What is changing? Market transitions don't wait for anyone. Security and safety is another piece of this. Think about what social media brings to the table, but in a secure fashion. The public sector is going to get leaner and meaner. Today it is a network economy feeding on information. Now you have so much data that you need to access the relevant data. Dynamic is the way to think about it. Interagency coordination is needed.

Constant change is going to be tough. Collaboration is the answer, not command and control. Need to outthink and outmaneuver the events that are going to impact us. We used to function in the PC world. Today it is all about mobile. By 2013 there will be 1 trillion devices connecting people across the world.Getting these all to work with a seamless interface is the key...for future collaboration.

The Earth's atmosphere is determined in large part by ocean bacteria; every day viruses kill half of them. Every year in the oceans, viruses transfer a trillion trillion genes between host organisms. They evolve faster than anything else, and they are a major engine of the evolution of the rest of life. Our own bodies are made up of 10 trillion human cells, 100 trillion bacteria, and 4 trillion very busy viruses. Some of them kill us. Many of them help us. Some of them are us. Viral time is ancient and blindingly fast.

Science journalist Carl Zimmer's wrote "A Planet of Viruses" and explains in this presentation what is known about the viruses. SARS, HIV and H1N1 are covered, as well as the need for an annual vaccination, since viruses mutate so rapidly. The other Long Now Foundation videos at this site are worth a look. Steward Brand, publisher of "The Whole Earth Catalog" is the founder and moderator for questions after the presentation.

The system is based on a geocode scheme set up for earth that focuses on established political boundaries as a basis for regional grouping of nations, states and localities. It is decimal system based to take advantage of the sort criteria for numbers in computers. It utilized the Sector Group and Region codes of the United Nations and ISO. Geographic information system technology does not solve the problem, but its tools can be used with the geocodes.

The geocode system effectively organizes Wikipedia entries as a library management and the geocodes can be used for data aggregation. This has been developed under a Creative Commons license and would benefit from a global network implementation where local users cooperatively related subnational geographic regions and component political geography.

Search This Blog

Earth ( we know its a spherical whole)

Humanity's Local Planet

Universe Man at the Boundary

Local Planet - Regional Space

Our Local Planet has systems of Political Geographies which combine as Regional/Greater Communities

Universe Man's place on earth is local and regional silmultaneously depending upon the system of regions, sub-regions of the planet as local wholes: continents, nations, states, provinces, districts, counties, shires, municipalities. etc., which have local regions within and between them which are capable of being greater communities at many scales.

Based on my experience as a regional planner and agency director, 1973 -2008, and in recognition of emerging "regional communities," I developed three thoughts about community that relate to the challenge of working across-boundaries as greater or regional communities. The thoughts/theses apply for communities at the scale of bonding or bridging social capital as defined by Robert D. Putnam, which is alternately local or regional. (link below)

As of 2011, considering the global financial crisis brought about by pursuit of the "profit motive," it struck me that this has come to dominate modern life. This is a relatively new invention of civilization and wasn't a concern for most of the time that homo sapiens has been on the planet.

The three thoughts below that had emerged in my experience of working on regional cooperation now represent what I now posit as the "community motive." Concern about "profit" can emerge within an established community over time, but, to my mind the "profit motive" does not exist in the wild.

1) Community precedes cooperation.2) Community is how life solves all problems.3) Security is the primary purpose of community.

These three thoughts, theses if you will, are the basis of the "community motive." Following is some exposition about each one.

As I see it, security has always been the priority for humans since the plains of Africa. That's why communities first seek to establish defensible boundaries. After the basics are in place, security focus shifts to the social and economic. Boundaries work like the membrane in the osmosis experiment most of us have seen in a science class. The membrane is a filter that lets the good things pass through, but keeps unwanted things out. (Osmosis -YouTube - 45 sec.)

The evolved political boundaries of today have consequence. The rules change when you cross them. Though marked on the ground and fortified in some instances, they are conceptual, as pictured above, with Universe Man. The boundary divides the space between local, that within, and regional, everything outside, as labeled in the second panel. The third panel repeats the image within, to show, without graphic elegance, that the land on which Universe Man sits is regional at another scale, as determined by other boundaries, and another area that's local. A territory is both local and regional, depending upon the perspective.

Communities of communities, “regional communities” are greater communities organized to solve a problem, be it managing a watershed, strengthening an economic cluster or ensuring peer competition for school sports. Regional boundaries can be imposed for administrative purposes within states, but for these to be a basis for effective cooperation, a greater community sense is needed for that geography among the people. This is true for multi-state and multi-national regional communities as well. The leaders with such a vision can build a regional community by finding that which is already in place.

This is not to suggest that community is easy to build in order to solve problems. In a crisis, humans of any culture, belief or politics can quickly come together and self-organize to save themselves and others. It was the on-the- ground response to the 9/11 attacks that demonstrated to me the deep responsiveness of human community, as well as the fundamental importance of security. Community is how humans have always survived. This, I think, extends to all life forms.